I was recently at the Iowa Bandmaste's Conference and sat in on a great presentation by David Law, a past president of the IBA and current president of the Iowa Alliance for Arts Education. One of his duties is travelling around the state providing assistance to schools that find themselves in the face of potential fine arts program cuts. His main point throughout the presentation was that school music programs should be proactive instead of reactive and start advocating for their programs BEFORE the threat of cuts emerges. Here are the top six suggestions that I found to be very useful.
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Just because an instrument has MADE IN CHINA stamped on it no longer automatically means that it is of poor quality. It turns out that the thing that matters, usually, is the age of the company and the attention they give to improving their products over time. New manufacturers and manufacturers with low budgets for research and development of their products in order to meet the lowest possible price points will almost certainly have problems. Recently though, some low cost manufacturers actually have figured out how to avoid that problem and create instruments that in most cases are more than acceptable to music teachers and school band directors.
If you are a public school band director you have to face the facts. No matter what you say, no matter how you say it, you will still wind up with inferior quality instruments being brought into your band rehearsals. We have complained and argued about the percieved poor quality of these instruments, coming from dozens of different manufacturers and being sold in stores along side the Barbie dolls and NERF guns. For nearly twenty years we have complained about instruments that break at the slightest bit of excess pressure or repair parts that are almost impossible to get. The question is, in the last twenty years have things really changed and in reality, is a $125 trumpet really a bad thing?
For more than a decade now band directors have lamented the influx of ultra low-cost musical instrument brands being made overseas in China and in other countries. The complaints have, for the most part, centered around intonation problems, lack of durability, and difficulty in getting repairs done quickly. To have heard the complaints back in the late 1990’s one would have thought that absolutely nothing good in the way of musical instruments ever came out of China in those early years.
Okay, I know the physics says that you can make a brass instrument out of pretty much any resonating tube, but the idea of playing on a piece of PVC pipe just bugs me.... Today I stopped into my local music retailer to pay off a bill and sitting behind the counter was a brilliantly colored yellow trombone. Walking around the side to get a better look I realized it wasn't just a fancy paint job, it really was made of PLASTIC! 
